A handsomely bound copy of the first edition of John of Damascus’s ‘Ekdosis’, edited by the Veronese scholar and philologist Bernardino Donato. Born in Syria, then under Muslim rule, John of Damascus (c.675-c.749) had a Christian education imbued with Hellenic influences, and became a monk. The ‘Ekdosis’ is his most influential work; much admired by Thomas Aquinas, it provided the theological and philosophical basis for medieval Scholasticism. It is the third part of ‘The Fount of Knowledge’ (‘Pēgē Gnōseos’), which includes a study of Aristotelianism as a philosophical instrument for Christian theology, and a survey of hundreds of heresies. Divided into four books, the ‘Ekdosis’ draws from Greek philosophy and Patristic theology to discuss the individual and Trinitarian nature of God, his visible and invisible creation, his concern for human salvation, the eucharist, baptism, and the veneration of relics and icons. Influential arguments in the ‘Ekdosis’ were those of ‘hyposthasis’ (God as the union of divine and human) and ‘negative theology’ (the ineffability of the mystery of God). The dedication to Clement VII styles the ‘Ekdosis’ as a masterpiece of Christian theology in the Greek tongue, and a ‘very sharp weapon’ against contemporary opponents of the Church: the Lutherans, ‘deserters of the truth’, and the Ottoman ‘barbarous nations’ currently at war with Christianity.

Stefano Nicolini moved with his family from Sabbio (Brescia) to Venice in the 1520s. He showed an immediate interest in the printing of Greek texts, from major literary and theological authors to beginners’ manuals to write, read, and speak the language. Between 1529 and 1532, Nicolini was in Verona where he printed works by the Greek Church Fathers for the bishop Gian Matteo Giberti, including the ‘Ekdosis’. He was assisted by Bernardino Donato, former professor of Greek at Padua and collaborator of Aldus, whose solid Patristic editions had been praised by Erasmus.

The earliest and most copious annotations concentrate in the sections on the understanding and evidence of the nature of God, the Holy Spirit, and the Trinity. The annotator—possibly ‘TM’—glossed them with detailed philosophical notes and illustrated them schematically with diagrams. He added an alphabetic index to the volume and passages from other sources concerning icons and the soul.